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I’ve not been paying enough attention, but I don’t remember the Facebook vote for what the Female Shepard should look like being in multiple stages. Perhaps it always was, or perhaps it was a reaction to the phenomenon of this article by Kim Richards, but either way the process is now extended to include a choice for Shepard’s hair colour. Yes, it really has come to this. It’s interesting to note that the blonde hair that was thought to have motivated much of the first round win is currently very far behind. I’m very pleased to report that red hair is currently far ahead, with black hair in second place, far ahead of blonde and brown. (Now I’m just going to build a fort around me to protect myself from my blonde fiancée.)

Based on the hundred-page long threads during Rift Beta where people were complaining that the women were FLATCHESTED OH MY GOD THEY’RE BARELY C CUPS, I hold no hopes for the gamer population were that choice offered here.

I so hate that trend of gazoongas like the effing moon in games. They’re so unwieldly! Although, I would love to have the option to change body type more in games, especially RPGs. The only time i could make a facsimile of myself was in APB, and well . . .

Actually, it would be interesting to see what a gamers ideal girl would be, no? If it was carried out with a bit of class I would be interested in seeing the results. Would it be as objectified and superficial as gamers are seen to be, or would it end up with a nice, normal girl? Personally, I always get a little mouth-sick when I see women with nary a stitch on, make-up caked on, a full ten pounds of extensions, and boobs to cripple backs. Give me my short, Fae-like girls with blue eyes, brown hair, APPROPRIATELY SIZED BOOBIES, and most importantly personality.

No no, think about it. Customization, Creativity, Avatar Personalization, it’d have all the stuff that’s interesting in games right now. You’d throw in some basic survival stuff; you need to construct clothes to protect yourself from wind, rain, bears, etc – and then some crafting stuff; you’d have to gather stuff to make into clothes (wool, iron, bears, etc). The players could be golems or something that can construct itself into new shapes, so that your entire appearance would be totally customizable. It’d be Minecraft, except you wear your house.

It’s not so much gamers who like stereotypical, big-boobed women, it’s teenagers who haven’t met many girls yet and still giggle when talking about sex. Sadly, there’s a big, Venn diagram-like overlap.

Have a little pity on David Silverman and the rest of EA’s marketing dorks. They still think that “marketing to women” = “holding contests to see what the existing male market will fap to the hardest.”

Re heterochromia: You reminded me of a cosmetic mod for Bloodlines that (among other things) gives the Malkavian character a pair of Marilyn Manson-esque eyes that work really nicely with the whole insanity thing.

Exactly. Amazing how some people were projecting these enormously different personalities on FemShep one to five…. and the only difference was the hair color. Same haircut, same face, same body. But no, appearently one is a vile bimbo and another a smart sassy free spirit.

yeah, the whole point of this revote is because most people voted for the blonde one because she had the best hair style. Nothing about the blonde shep was bimbo-esque but people panicked anyway, glad to see the red head winning now though, as my femshep was red hair, green eyes with glowing orange facial scars due to her being a renegade.

People have taken the minority of complaints about the femShep contest–in this case, the instances of people calling the blond model a bimbo–and pretended that was the only argument of “the women who were outraged.” The women who were outraged were mostly sad that Shepard looked like a 20-year-old model, not a badass space marine. Bimbo epithets, when I saw them, came mostly from men.

It’s crazy, but now that they’ve changed her hair to red she looks the spitting image of a girl I used see. I hadn’t noticed it with blonde hair (even though technically she was blonde but dyed it red).

And now to offset the fact that I talked about past ladies of mine on RPS I’ll pretend it was satirical of John mentioning his fiancee. SATIRE! DOWN YOUR THROATMINDS!

She’s a soldier and a hero, risen from the grave to save the universe again and again and again.
How do you imagine a person like that would look like?

What happens now will shape the look of the games in the next years Bioware is making.
I’m talking whats coming after Mass Effect 3. It could end like CoD. Playing another stroy and it feels the same. Playing again, again and again.

It’s not about look, it’s what the look says about the character. Shepard is a badass character that’s all about doing what needs to be done. I somehow doubt someone like that gets up in the morning and spends two hours doing their hair and putting on makeup, yaknow?

Reading his comment again, yes… I can see that, although he doesn’t appear to be saying it, he does indeed seem to be implying that Mass Effect is targeting an audience with a disturbing predilection for young boys. That isn’t just insulting, that is a downright disgusting thing to be insinuating.

@Wizardry,

Do you have any evidence to back your outlandish claim? You yourself recently stated on a Forum thread that “I very rarely (if ever) insult people”, whereas, it appears here that you have, rather deplorably, insulted a great, great many people… baselessly accusing them of something quite, quite vile.

However, now that you’ve mentioned it, she really *does* look more like a boy. Somewhat androgynous. In reality, he’s probably the singer of a hip noise pop band, dressed up as an astronaut for a half-trashy-half-cute music video about astronauts finding love on a distant planet, shot in Super 8 in the garden of the keyboard guy and around a local lake. Well. Now that would be a story for Mass Effect 3.

Firstly, were there differences beyond hair-colour or style in the previous choices? Maybe a slight skin-tone change? As far as I could tell, they all used exactly the same model.

Secondly, what’s the point? There’s always been the default Female Shepherd who could be used for adverts, and throwing it open to public debate… Why? There’s a character editor. Everyone can play with the character they want. Many will be importing one anyway.

I’m starting to wonder if EA recently hired some of Sony’s old PR team.

I’m all for fan interaction with developers but this is really weird. I checked the Facebook page and there’s no indication on the old “poll” that there would be a part 2. So this somewhat invalidates the previous one (looks like “bimbo” won’t have blonde hair) and basically proves that EA PR doesn’t know how to properly issue surveys.

I really don’t have a horse in this race because I’ll probably get the Digital Deluxe edition, but it’s pointless junk like this which causes EA’s marketing teams to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I’m not looking forward to them kicking things into overdrive in a few months when they have to start shoring up pre-orders for “BEST LAUNCH EVER” numbers.

Well, this is good, because in the previous Mass Effect games blonde hair looked terrible.

What Bioware should have done was release an update to ME1 and ME2 that polled players’ savegames and pulled the average values for each feature. They would have ended up with a rather attractive, but not hyperfeminine woman. Completely average features add up to being somewhat above average. Well, maybe they shouldn’t have done that because it’s an unsettling invasion of people’s privacy, but it would have definitely been the popular result.

What I really don’t understand is why should I be interested in appearance of defaultShep at all. Since they allowed us to customise Shep’s face, I mean, they can make defShep greenhaired, or bald, or with proboscis instead of nose, I just don’t care about it. The whole thing is plain pointless if you ask me, which you didn’t but anyway.

Now this is an article on gaming feminism I would love to read: Is there a bias toward attractive women in the gaming community? I’ve heard it discussed as a problem in the skeptic community – a lot of it dredged up by the whole Dawkins versus Rebecca Watson thing – and I wonder if there’s any overlap amongst gamers? (ie: your capability with a keypad decreases in an inverse proportion to your looks)

Which is a long way around trying to make the point that some people might be voting for HawtShep because they find it easy to identify with her as an avatar, not because they’re a leering group of schoolkids.

(Though to be fair, they’re probably just a leering group of school kids).

What is this Dawkins vs Watson thing, and what does it have to do with gamers objectifying when?

Near as I can figure it, Dawkins is angry that Watson implied that atheists are sexist because she was sexually harassed at an atheist convention. From that point to the one you’re making is quite a stretch.

Yeah, I’m having trouble making sense of your post too. Are you suggesting that the sexier a woman is the better she is at games, therefore female gamers are generally more sexy, therefore female gamers chose the ‘sexiest’ Shepard because they relate to her?

I hope you’re not suggesting this, but if you are, stop it because it’s ridiculous.

To be honest… I think we could use more ugliness in general in games. Both for the women and the men. How often have the men been completely unattractive due to how unnaturally perfect they are in regards to everything about them? As a realistic gay person, I just don’t enjoy that, and I’m really put off by all that perfection. It’s like all game engines can manage is perfection.

No. Sigh. This is not an attack on Bioware. Hold your finger away from that mouse button, I know you have the cursor hovering over Reply. No, this is just a complaint in general, because since the dawn of time I’ve noticed that this has been an issue. Consider this: Uru sticks out in my mind for many reasons, but one of them is that you can actually have a chubby character. Can you imagine that? Chubby!

I had a chubby guy in Uru, in a maintainer suit, even. It was amazing. And that I can actually name instances like that just goes to prove my point – that the gaming industry tends to fixate over some form of sexiness that just doesn’t appeal to me, a form of ethereal perfection that really invites the uncanny valley. I’d like to see more options for weight, blemishes, scars, and so on.

Does anyone else see what I’m getting at here or is this just one of those things where I’m a crazy loner who desires things of the gaming industry that the vast, vast, vast, vast majority does not? I’m genuinely curious. Am I the only person who’d, say, want to play an overweight, grubby Nord? Or a Khajiit with a torso-long, since-healed gash? Is that unusual?

But again, I just don’t connect with this sex-appeal through perfection thing. It doesn’t click with me. I could assume that it’s meant for younger people who aren’t that acquainted with the world quite yet, but I don’t know whether that’s a fair assumption, it might actually have a more broad appeal than that. But I know I’ve heard many a lady say that she’s fed up of having to play a sex bomb in a game, and I can totally relate to that. I understand that. I sympathise. And I think it’s something we should be doing something about.

It’s funny, only the other day, one person I know said that she’s going to play a charr in Guild Wars 2 because of the nature of women in games. This is both praise for and perhaps one of the few strikes against GW2 that I can make. The non-charr races… with perhaps the exception of the Asura, maybe… all have very, very sexed up female counterparts. Cosmetics, large breasts, china doll perfection, and all that noise. It’s perhaps the element of Guild Wars 2 that I am least fond of.

With the charr though you have a thing of fangs, claws, fur, and fury, and without giant breasts somehow being held up by sexy magicks attached to them. I can see how that would be appealing as opposed to the other options women have available. Again, I can sympathise with that.

Anyway, I’ll leave it at that. Food for thought for you to chew over. My second piece thereof in this thread.

(DISCLAIMER: This is not directed at Bioware, if you read the post then I’ve actually pointed out that it’s a problem across a broad selection of games, even my favourites. I think it’s something that we should fix, in general.)

@Wulf: You’re not alone. I always test those body sliders to see if I can get a chubby guy. It worked in Saint’s Row 2, where I managed to basically copy my own body and face! I usually don’t aim to play myself, being a roleplayer at heart, but having the opportunity for once, I just had to go for it.

I must admit, though, that I wouldn’t create an unattractive woman to play. Maybe that’s chauvinistic, I don’t know. I don’t necessarily dress females up in revealing clothing, though, if I have the choice. My latest Champion’s Online is in a battlesuit and it does NOT have breasts attached to it, even though that was hard to pull of with the sliders CO gives you.

I was actually thinking of that just now and you’re right, it does. This actually goes for Geralt, too, now that I think of it. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s heroes like Geralt that make me think like this. But I wish they’d kept his original face and not listened to the community, you know? He looked much more haggard before, but they changed him up to look more rugged and handsome. That’s one strike against them right there, and it is a shame, but I can understand why they did it.

If you look at Geralt in the first game though, he is pretty cut up as I recall, and that’s amazing. There are so few instances of this and I really think there could be more. But look at what you did – you cited one instance, like I did with Uru. It’s so uncommon that you can pick the games which do it out as rarities, but they are uncommon. And often even if it allows it for the men, it doesn’t for the women, so there’s imbalance there, even.

Some women want to play as sex bombs and they have that option. That’s fantastic. But what about the ones that don’t? And again, same goes for guys, but we do have it slightly better in that regard, but still, I am disappointed at how often there are chances for imperfections, blemishes, chubbiness, hell even things like lost teeth or a lost eye. Hell, perhaps even an amputated limb. Could you imagine how that would change up how an RPG is played? You’d have a permanent debuff on yourself, but you’d choose it. If you wanted to, anyway.

It’s just something I think games should be exploring.

@Sian

Yeah, Saints Row was great in that regard. It was indeed possible to create an interesting looking character that wasn’t as pretty as the norm. And Champions Online’s sliders are very handy. You can almost pull off chubby with certain uses of mass and a lack of visible muscle. I did that for one bear character I made, but I still wish I’d been able to make him even more rotund, because that suited the character. As amazingly diverse as CO is, I could still see room for even more.

—

If I was ever involved in a game, one thing I would love to do is a steampunk character whose lost an arm and a leg (on the same side) from an accident. And I’d love to work that into the gameplay mechanics. Wherein you actually have to keep them powered up, and the more their power goes down, the more disabled you become.

So when you’re fully fuelled up and you have the smokestacks going at full blast, you’re actually far, far stronger than you normally would be, but over time that goes down. You could even have little steampunk drones working to refuel you that you’d have to defend.

It’s just an interesting little side concept that would add a little more to a game, for me.

@ Wulf: totally agree with your first post. But I would add that, as you yourself suggest, imperfect does not necessarily equal ugly, but perfect always equals boring.

My Shepard is a blonde but and she’s kind of mean and rugged, attractive at certain angles but also a bignose and a bit funny looking. I actually meant to make her more attractive but the character editor in ME1 didn’t really give you the full picture and you had to sit through a bunch of cutscenes before you get to see her properly, and after a couple of attempts I got bored and stuck with her.

Thing is, I’m so glad I did because I believe in her (I BELIEVE in you!) way more than I would any plasticy sex-bomb.

Plus, if there’s no ugly people in games, how do we know who’s hot? It MAKES SENSE.

My amateur hypothesis is that someone who is considered “really good looking” will gravitate naturally into careers and social dynamics that are not relatively isolated like the gamer/computer geek stereotype.
Obviously with exceptions, but my guess is if you lined up 100 Police officers, 100 physicians, and 100 Java programers, the “hot or not” scale would decline in the latter group.

Games let us (gamers) be what we largely are not: Attractive heroes, etc. Also technically, it’s more difficult to make game elements that suit a wide (no pun) array of character model types. Having very obese or overly short, tall etc variances cause issues with animations, clipping of various models/meshes.

In nerd communities, it’s mean and unfair to make fun of fat or ugly people. But a good looking blonde girl? Hell, she probably can’t even read anyway.

As marketing material, I’m personally totally fine with a good-looking blonde girl, because I know I’m still going to be able to make my ManShep look like K-Fed, which is all I really want out of life. But the sneering outcry against Blondie isn’t a cool, punk rock way of showing the prom queen you didn’t actually mean that love poem you wrote her. It’s just plain-ol’ misogyny.

PS: I don’t want to belabor the Dawkins/Watson connection because it probably isn’t that germane, but definitely read up on it if the nested misogyny of geek subcultures is of any interest to you. The Salon article linked above is a good place to start, but definitely listen to the relevant eps of SGU, and check out skepchick.

I was about to post and say I find this whole ‘choose a sexy She-pard’ thing a bit icky, but then I realised it’s basically a public consensus version of what we all do when we fire up the game and create a character.

Then again I do always feel a little bit icky when using a character creator anyway. I recall spending hours trying to start a new Oblivion character and hearing my girlfriend say “why don’t you stop making sexy men and actually play the game?”

My problem wasn’t that she was blonde, it was everything else. The long, messy hair is impractical. The face is too young – she’s 31 in ME2, and this woman looks like a teenager. Too much makeup, no lines or scars. And only one nonwhite choice. I could have lived with a blonde, if it wasn’t for all the rest of it.
Personally, I hate that the vote is on Facebook. Firstly because I don’t use it, and secondly because if they’d had it on the BSN or something I think the voters would be more likely to be people who actually care.

Not that I particularly disagree with you on any specific point, but I do suspect that in the future people who are 31 will not look like people who are 31 today. After all, we can regenerate life threatening injuries in the field in both ME1 and 2, so it’s likely that medical science as a whole is improved.

That’s a fair point, and you’re probably right. But looking at it from a 21st-century perspective, it throws me off a bit. And all of the other humans (except Miranda) seem to look their age, unless I’m forgetting one.

I want them to have an optional Beta Ray Bill cosmetic option. Because I hate Bioware and I want their degenerate, filth-sucking character designers and 3D modellers to suffer as they struggle to implement a gaunt, equine head into their lip synch animations.
Also I want Varren romance options. The deliberate absence of bestial romance in the Mass Effect series is glaring evidence towards their discrimination against relationships that offend their narrow-minded, ignorant sensibilities and they should be ashamed of themselves – obnoxious half-breed frogeaters that they are.
Oh, and a side quest where Shepard contracts scale-itch and has to get it treated in the most discreet manner possible.

I would be for all of that. Not because I hate Bioware, but because I want Bioware to do interesting things, and all of that sounds interesting.

I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with interesting, myself.

(I mean, good grief, can you imagine how a relationship with a sentient Varren would twist people up inside? Games need to DO this. They need to go to these places and explore these things, just to get people out of their damn comfort zones. The only requirement I’d have is that it would really have to be well-written, and perhaps Obisidian might be the only ones who could pull it off properly. I don’t know. But I would love to see Bioware try!)

(Really, I’ll add to this because I honestly would love to see Bioware deal with the issues of granting rights to a newly sentient, non-bipedal race of small creatures. Should they be allowed property? Land? Should interspecies romance be a taboo purely because they’re non-bipedal? How would racism come into this? How would the media handle the first human-Verran relationship? Seriously… there’s good stuff there, for a decent writer.)

@Wulf: Have BioWare actually done anything interesting since KOTOR1 and NWN? Their original series (ME and DA) feel more like plastered over versions of these games but with less depth, in my opinion. I played NWN and KOTOR1 (as well as KOTOR2 and NWN2, even though these are both Obsidian but still) after ME1 & 2 and DA:O, and the similarities were remarkable – not just the general settings but I found a lot of characters, locations and plot features to be directly comparable.

Jeus tittyfucking Christ that PC Gamer article raises my bloodpressure by a… lot. Substitute “blonde bimbo” with “lazy black person”, “job-stealing latino” or any other disgusting racial stereotype and see if you could get that shit published. But she’s white so it’s okay, right?

The caption underneath the picture of Shep 5 says; “If the future is in the hands of this blonde bimbo, I’m out.” Would it have been okay if she was upset over the fact that the character had black hair and then called that character derogatory names? My point is, she draws all kinds of conclusions based on the way Shep 5 looks and in my eyes it is quite close to racism.

Maybe I’m getting it wrong, but in my understanding it was about hair, not race. My wife is perfectly white and she’s brunette. Though since my mother is blonde I do find all that prejudice against blonde women (not men, isn’t that interesting?) a little fucking irritating, I don’t think it has anything to do with the race.

Ah, yes, I see the “bimbo” now.
It’s a tricky one. On the one hand Richards is calling for fairer treatment of women in games by suggesting that resorting to the overused ‘pretty blonde’ archetype is lazy and contributes to the misrepresentation of women as a whole in games.

On the other hand, she does seem to have a problem with blondes, and does use the word “bimbo”, which isn’t very fair to blonde women and could be seen to be perpetuating an outdated stereotype.

I for one think that misrepresentation of women in games is a far more serious issue, and that the language Richards uses in addressing it is mostly appropriate, if a little petulant.

However, her argument has absolutely no relation to racism and it is quite offensive to me that you defend this link.

Edit: what I mean is that racism is not just discrimination based on looks. It’s discrimination based on race. To suggest that voicing a preference for non-blondes is the same as voicing a preference for non-blacks (for example) is plainly wrong.

Maybe i’m reading too much into this, but for some reason i don’t think that, had Shep 5 been non-white and dyed blonde, the writer”d be so upset over it.

Anyhow, I can’t stomach her way of perpetuating a lot of stereotypes about blonde women and then seemingly trying to get a way with it by proclaiming it’s okay, because she is a woman too. So perhaps it isn’t racist, perhaps she’s just a bit prejudiced. Either way the article is a bit shit.

The blonde option is far behind because voting is largely a reactionary process. The people who were satisfied with the blonde Shepard already made their decision and probably don’t think there’s any chance that it will be changed. The people who hated the blonde Shepard are now furiously voicing their opinion, but probably didn’t participate heavily in the initial vote. So now we’ve got a situation in which a majority-rules decision will ultimately not reflect the majority because Bioware doesn’t want to anger the dissenters, despite the fact that there wasn’t anything to prevent them from being heard in the first place.

I don’t really care what the character looks like, whether she’s blonde or brunette or got pink hair or what. I just don’t see any reason not to go with the same default female Shepard as they’ve had since ME1. It’s reasonably attractive, but also looks a bit older and more experienced and tough, like the male Shepard, which is appropriate for the “soldier/hero” archetype. The choices they’re offering here all look more like freshman college coeds.